Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

Strange and indeed unique is the spectacle, and it reminds one forcibly of the unchanged character of the Jews. After nineteen centuries of wandering and exile, they are still the same as ever, still bound by the iron chain of Talmudic law, a people whose slavery to custom outruns even that of the Chinese to etiquette, and whose veneration for the past appears to bar the way of progress or improvement in the present.

Entering by the gate of the Cotton Bazaar, we stand at length within the Temple courts. Before us are the steps which lead up to the platform where shoes must be removed; for while the outer court, like the old Court of the Gentiles, is a promenade, the paved platform is a sacred enclosure, not to be trodden except barefoot.

From the bright sunlight we pass suddenly into the deep gloom of the interior, lit with the “dim religious light” of the glorious purple windows. The gorgeous colouring, the painted wood-work, the fine marble, the costly mosaics, the great dome flourished all over with arabesques and inscriptions, and gilded to the very top, all this splendour gleams out here and there from the darkness.

And in honour of what is this beautiful chapel built? A low canopy of rich silk covers the dusty limestone ledge round which the “Dome of the Rock” has risen. The Rock of Paradise is the scene of Mohammed’s ascension, the source of the rivers of Paradise, the Place of Prayer of all the Prophets, the Foundation-stone of the World.

Such was the holy spot enshrined by the Dome. The sacred rock, recovered and purified by Omar, was soon after enclosed by the Khalif Abd el Melek, and the inscriptions on the walls give the history of this building with most remarkable detail.

The Arab historians relate that the Dome of the Chain was the model for the Dome of the Rock. Now this is possible, if we except the outer wall of the latter. Take that wall away, and you have a building consisting of two concentric polygons, with pillars bound together by a wooden beam, and supporting arcades. The Dome of the Rock is just three times the size of the Dome of the Chain, and the various measures of plan and height are proportional. The smaller building may therefore have been originally the model of the larger.

Over the outer arcade of the Dome of the Rock runs the great Cufic inscription, giving the date of the erection of the building in 688 A.D. The name of Abd el Melek, the fourth of the Ommiyah Khalifs, has been taken out at a later period, and that of Mamûn, one of the Abbasîyeh Khalifs, substituted; but the clumsy forger has forgotten the date, and has used a lighter blue in the grounding, thus the antiquity of the text is the more confirmed by the alteration.

This inscription dates the arcade, and thus apparently the inner circle, but not necessarily the outer wall, which may be later. The doors in this outer wall bear Cufic inscriptions dating 831 A.D., at which time Mamûn restored the building; the beams in the roof resting on the wall bear the date 913 A.D. In the ninth century the pointed arch began to be used by the Arabs, and the outer wall cannot be dated later than this; but if it be, as may naturally be supposed, of the same date with its doors, it is part of the work of El Mamûn, and this agrees with the idea that ’Abd el Melek’s Dome of the Rock consisted of two concentric arcades only, proportional to those of the Dome of the Chain. The symmetry of the present proportions is destroyed by the great breadth of the larger building in comparison with its height, which is due simply to the addition of the outer wall. Once remove the outer wall, and the pleasing proportions of the Dome of the Chain are reproduced to three times their scale.

The Dome of the Rock belongs to that obscure period of Saracenic art when the Arabs had not as yet created an architectural style of their own, and when they were in the habit of employing Byzantine architects to build their mosques. Among the rare specimens of their work at this time, is the Mosque of ’Amrû, at Cairo, commenced in 642 A.D., and apparently almost rebuilt by that very ’Abd el Melek whose work in Jerusalem we are now considering.

Of the Egyptian building Mr. Fergusson writes: “It probably now remains in all essential parts as left by these two Caliphs” (’Abd el Melek and his successor, Walid). It is therefore very interesting to compare the Jerusalem Haram with the Cairo mosque, and the resemblance is striking.